


Into the High Noon Sun

by halbeshaus



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Alternate Future, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Background Character Death, M/M, Not Epilogue Compliant
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-14
Updated: 2018-06-14
Packaged: 2019-05-21 23:52:26
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,776
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14925404
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/halbeshaus/pseuds/halbeshaus
Summary: “Of all the people who could be alive,” Severus said. “It had to be you.” The sound of speech was alien. He hadn’t thought to hope that he still had a voice. Lupin smiled, the same tight one from when they had first met as colleagues.





	Into the High Noon Sun

**Author's Note:**

> A massive thank you to my wonderful beta for putting up with all my angst. :)

Harry Potter was dead. The memory of his still body was so tangible that if Severus reached out his hand far enough he was sure he’d be able to grasp at the boy’s robes.The thought was there for a fleeting moment when he opened his eyes and then it was gone. All he was left with was the bare ceiling and his arm outstretched towards it, fingers tracing the cracks above. It didn’t do to dwell on one’s failures but if anyone deserved to wake to visions of their guilt, then surely it was him.

(The cracks were everywhere, in everything — the sky, the ocean when he had seen it last, the streets of muggle and wizarding London both. The ones in the ceiling of his newest flat were a month old, having spun out from pinprick holes he had barely noticed at first. For twenty years, ever since that boy had dared to breathe his last, the world had been crumbling. Severus was sure.)

Perhaps Potter’s death had been for the best. He had died young and glorious in the wake of Voldemort’s fall. He had collapsed onto the hard floor of the great hall, nose bleeding, stone staining red beneath him, heart beating so loud Severus had heard it from where he stood. The boy’s face — Severus didn’t like to think about it. The slack of his jaw, how his eyes (Lily green) had met his own. The boy had died knowing he had succeeded. That was all that mattered. The following two decades were lost to him, a tragedy at the time, but now they had come to pass, surely Potter had been spared.

The window to Severus’ bedroom was curtainless, the girl who had lived here before him having never seen fit to use one, or having taken it with her when she left (wherever she had gone to). The glowing light of day came in unadjusted, unwriting the night before. He tried not to think of Potter, he had already done so enough for the day. But it was twenty years exactly since he had died. Twenty years to the minute, the second. He didn’t need to look at his watch to know.

He got up from bed, pushed his shoulders back and his chest out to muster up the ache of being alive. He looked outside at the dull buildings towering above his own. It was time to move on.

***

The tunnels built in muggle London were ingenious. A network hidden under the chaos above, spread out like a spider’s web, like a labyrinth. (He ignored the flashes of the minotaur, ignored all the evils he had seen.) The train tracks had once vibrated, powered by smoke and steam, then later electricity. Now, silence reverberated in the tunnels. The trains here had been the last in the country to keep running. Severus had left the city some ten years ago to travel to where he was registered for Wizard’s Rations. By the time he had returned, four days later at most, the framework of the city was missing. Almost as if it had never existed in the first place.

He knew the city above ground as well as he did below. The tunnels gave restraint, a pitch black path from which he couldn’t stray. He knew this specific route well, knew it down to the second: where to put his feet, when the tunnel would start to curve or incline, at what point he needed to reach out and pull himself up onto the platform. His wand was in his back pocket, he didn’t need to walk it blind. But he liked it, not seeing but knowing all the same that what he was doing was right. One simple _lumos_ and the endlessness of the tunnels would become apparent, the weight of the dark would be crushing rather than comforting.

His wand was nothing, incapable of saving wizard kind from the wrath of muggles, unable to shield him from a hail of bullets. He didn’t know if he could do it — didn’t want to know how much magic there was left in the world. Didn’t want to bring light down here (in that optimistic train of thought which told him that if he tried hard enough he could still do it, despite the foolishness of the thought) only to see the cracks (crawling like the veins in his hands) had found their way down here. Didn’t want the dark to be more than just a feeling, didn’t want to know the peeling advertisements on the platform walls.

He knew the tunnels like the back of his hand. He didn’t need light to see. Didn’t need magic to prove he could.

***

He paused, emerging from Kings Cross St Pancras, blinked back the golden sun from his eyes. The light of day was harsh, unnerving. He passed the barrier for Platform9 3/4, ignored it like one would a wound in their side. The nee to press fingers against cool brick was brief. The thought went unexplored, his suspicions unaffirmed. There was magic left in the world. There had to be.

He took a seat on a metal bench as far from 9 3/4 as possible, as if waiting for a train.

***

He walked for days along the train tracks north, the ones which fell east towards the sea. The cycle of sunrise and sunset drove him from himself. Five years ago he would not have dared take a route so open. Instead he would have taken the woods beside the track, wand clutched in hand, not stashed away in his back pocket. Another five years before that he’d have apparated. Back then, there had been the issue of people. It had been years since Severus had seen another person. Four months ago, he had awoken to a scream echoing through the city, but it might have been him. There was no proof it hadn’t been. No-one to tell him otherwise.

(“Awoken” was a strong word. It implied the ability to sleep.)

The further North he walked, the more the quiet grew. Even the birds in the trees were stilling themselves, learning to live without making noise. They still opened their beaks as if to sing, but sound never came. In Peterborough there had been little change, the buildings smaller, less smoke stained. York was like London, in that fired had raged through the south west quarters, only stopped by rivers. In Newcastle his eyes remained glued to the rails, inspecting the fading gleam of metal and plants emerging through litters of stone. If it wasn’t seen, it remained unknown. The only noise was river and wind. He walked far further than he should have, far beyond the city boundaries until it was open countryside again the city was nothing more than a hint on the horizon. Stories once were traded, in the places where the resistance had met, of what had happened. In Newcastle there had been something worse than fire, something worse than reducing cities to black brick and smoke plumes.

He tried not to think of that other noise, the distant one underneath the sound of river and wind.

That night, he had gazed up at the star covered sky, felt the grass tickle his cheeks like he was once again a child. He was breathing still, his chest rose and fell in rhythm with his heart, as it had done then. The air was cool against the back of his throat. He was so used to the taste of smoke that on every inhale the clean air stung. How alive he felt now, how alive he must have been as a child when the worst thing in the world was his father. He had been so foolish then, to think that his abuse as a child was anything other than the highlight of his life. He didn’t dare close his eyes. Didn’t dare feign sleep.

With sunrise, he brushed the grass from jeans, pulled on his jacket (denim, faded blue on the elbows and where the straps of his backpack dug into his shoulders) and found his way back to the train tracks.

***

The North Sea was there ahead of him, blue grey and heaving as if it too were alive out of sheer desperation. The new wall was up ahead, stretched from east to west between Hadrian’s Wall and the Antonine. It had barely seen two decades and already it was crumbling into disrepair. Berwick-Upon-Tweed was left some miles behind him, the train through the town having at one point been the only way into Scotland. At first, the town had been full of people trying to cross the border (he hadn’t seen it for himself, but heard it years before from wizards posing as muggles to double their rations). He rested there, took food from unguarded ration bins, ate dry bread from his backpack, thought not of the weight in his chest, not of Potter, not of how the skin on his hands looked like it was cracking too.Berwick-Upon-Tweed was beautiful, resilient. Empty.

***

The tracks skirted the edge of the city and sea, wrapped up around Arthur’s Seat, grazed both the palace and the parthenon, and came to a rest in the space between Old Town and New. Once, they would have continued out through the city before turning north.

He had studied here in that in between, when Lucius Malfoy’s money could buy the world and Voldemort had yet to die. He had been seventeen (greasy black hair and sallow skinned, hands as yet unstained by years of potion making) when he arrived at this station, suitcase in hand, still wearing his black school robes. Potter had never been here. He had never collapsed onto the tarmac turning circle, knuckles white as they held onto life, blood dripping down his face. Yet, Severus could see it clear as day: the boy daring to die in front of him again and again, lying prostrate at his feet, blood pooling, green eyes locked to Severus’ own.

It seemed five days was the longest Severus could go without Potter doing something to disturb him.

He pushed it aside, left the image of a boy dying behind him and climbed the unmoving escalator onto the streets above.

***

By late afternoon he had looped round the east and up to the slope of the castle. He had walked 400 miles in a matter of days, but in the incline of the hill he found resistance. His stomach rolled with hunger, his throat dry with thirst, knees fighting his every move, hating the cobbled ground. He rounded the final corner, where narrow street gave away to wide open space, and the castle esplanade unfolded into view.

The sun was high behind the castle. The figure of a person was leaning over a wall, looking out into the city stretched out beneath them both. It must have been Potter, somehow alive, how he hunched over the low wall, with dark, unruly hair. He moved closer, hand resting over his brow, and dark hair turned golden brown, tinged with grey. The figure froze, shoulders drew tight underneath a dirty t-shirt. He turned around, eyes wide, the crease of a frown on his forehead. Hand reaching into his pocket, grasping for—

“Of all the people who could be alive,” Severus said. “It had to be you.” The sound of speech was alien. He hadn’t thought to hope that he still had a voice. Lupin smiled, the same tight one from when they had first met as colleagues.

There were cracks at the corner of Lupin’s lips, dry skin giving away to blood. The sky was the wrong colour blue.

***

(To think, how decades of peace could change a city. Then how war could reverse it all — centuries of change unwound from time.

Lupin had faltered. Then words spun from his mouth, explaining the city, his surprise at seeing Severus. Never touching the decades lost.)

***

Lupin’s arm was stretched out, fingers pointing over the city as if attempting to touch God. “I was thinking of going into New Town to see if I could find anything worth saving,” his fingers moved along the parallel streets. “You could join me.”

Severus wanted to laugh but no sound left him. That was it then, a chance meeting on the crest of a hill, and the apocalypse meant an eternity spent with Lupin. Severus glanced up at castle gates, then back to Lupin’s expectant eyes. Maybe it wasn’t just Hogwarts which was cursed, maybe every castle was.

“I don’t suppose you have any water?”

Lupin let out a breath, smiled wider this time. He reached down to his backpack on the ground, upzipped the top, and pulled a large bottle from within.

“Help yourself,” he said. “I’ve plenty more where that came from.”

The water was warm and plastic tasting, soothing his throat as he gulped it down. He hadn’t realised the dull headache between his eyes until now.

He offered the bottle back to Lupin who only shook his head, “I have more.”

The half empty bottle went into his own bag, slung back over his shoulders and trapped the loose denim jacket against the base of his spine.

Lupin had already started down the slope. His skin was tanned, his hair only just longer than it had been when they had last seen each other. Severus waited a moment before following him. They cut down a line of steps, connecting the jut of castle rock to the city below. The sun was prickling the back of his neck as they walked together. They followed the street round as it curved under a bridge and out past a graveyard.

“Have you seen many others?” he asked. The distinct lack of people in the world seemed like a safe conversation point.

Lupin glanced at him, the graze of his eyes sudden against Severus’ cheek.

“Not since I got here. Where I was before there were plenty of others, but it left rather a bitter taste in my mouth. I wasn’t in the mood for company afterwards.”

“And yet you’ve willingly assigned yourself to me.”

Lupin laughed once, a sound so certain Snape didn’t want to lose the memory of.

“I know we’re not friends, Severus. I have often thought of what I’d do had I met you again, but it doesn’t bare thinking of now. I fear you’re the only person left in the world who knows what I do, who has lived through and experienced what I have. I’d be a fool to push that away.”

The was a deep line in the tarmac, a gash centred in the middle of the road where paint had once been. It stretched behind them and out into the distance, a future yet trod.

“The moon’s tonight,” Lupin said. “I’d understand if you wanted to leave.” Sweat pooled around the neck of his shirt.

***

On the return, with new clothes held tight in their hands, Lupin led the way back to his flat. The top floor of an old brick building which looked out onto a vast stretch of green. The walls were white, stark and bright, as if time had stopped some twenty years ago.

“I rather like it here,” Lupin had said while they crossed the bridge into Old Town. “My own little home away from home. Certainly nicer than the last place I stayed.”

It was different to the places Severus had stayed in London. The floorboards were older, the walls thicker with time, the ceiling an impossible distance away. The sun, which had been unbearably hot outside that Severus’ jacket had rubbed his wrists raw, couldn’t warm the flat.

“Must be cold in winter,” Severus said, uncertain of what else he could say. A bitter retort was in there somewhere, lost in the ether of his mind, but the shock of people had stilled him. The act of speaking was hard enough after so long of words being nothing more than symbols on paper and blockade.

“I wouldn’t know. I’d rather bear the cold than the alternative.”

Something went unsaid. Something cruel and baiting. You must be grateful to have a roof over your head, wolf.

He turned to face Lupin who was leant against the dark wood door. Now they were inside away from the forgiving sun the circles beneath Lupin’s eyes were obvious. His eyes were amber flecked with gold, the shade the sun made his hair glow as if aflame. Severus was rooted to the spot, unable to move under the weight of someone there in front of him, alive. Someone with a pulse and heartbeat, someone whose lungs drew in air, someone else who lived as he had, once.

“Colour,” Lupin nodded at Severus’ denim jacket. “You always surprise me, Severus. How war had changed you.” His voice was low, undoing everything Severus had ever known about him. He pushed himself away from the door, moved to join Severus in the centre of the room. “You were so full of vicious remarks before. Always willing to knock me down a peg. To show me my place.”

So Lupin saw it too, how Severus stood not as man but as a shell. Did he see Potter as Severus did? Did he see how disjointed the world had become? Even the sky was crumbling, surely Lupin must see it.

“We’re the last,” Severus said. He wanted nothing more than to retreat back to who he was a teenager, to unwind his life from Lupin’s, and find salvage in their old rivalry. War had changed things, as it always did. At one point, Severus supposed, they weren’t friends exactly, but there was some sort of warmth left over from those desperate early years of this third war.

“Is that it? We two, the last people on earth. That’s what it takes for you to be kind?”

When had Lupin gotten so close? He could reach out, put his hands on Lupin’s chest and push him away, could punch him in the jaw, could scream vitriol in response to Lupin’s abject kindness. His hair looked soft, his t-shirt filthy. The sun was setting, turning the flat into a furnace. He refused to stray from Lupin’s eyes, knowing that if he looked elsewhere it would be the death of him, it would give himself away to the wolf.

“The moon is tonight,” the words sounded so strange in the air that Severus wasn’t sure if he had actually said them.

Lupin blinked. Smiled. “As if I could forget.” Then, realising somewhere Severus’ old fear (a fear that Severus himself had truly yet to remember), “I’ve got a cage in the spare room. I lock myself up an hour before moonrise. So far it’s been a success, I haven’t hurt anyone yet.” You’ve nothing to worry about, remained implicit.

“You had no-one around to hurt.”

Something flashed in Lupin’s eyes.

“I’ve only spent two moons here. I’m grateful to have your company for this third one.”

Lupin stepped away, looked down at the floor where their shadows fell. Then, motioning for Severus to follow, he fell into the routine of showing Severus the kitchen, the bathroom, where the food was kept, where the bottles of water were, how the shower still ran but didn’t heat.

At sunset, Lupin retired to his cage. He left his wand on the kitchen table, as useful as a stick.

Severus lay in a bed that smelt too much like Lupin, a brand new ceiling above him, with new patterns to be traced across it. This time there was no reminder Potter, but Lupin and the way his mouth moved around Severus’s name. He closed his eyes against the thought. Clutched the sheet with his fingers tight (knuckles white like Potter’s had been). Lupin was groaning, screaming with moonrise in the room beside his. Naked, his spine curving as the moon rained down her retribution. To think, the wolf he had once been so afraid of was trapped in a cage the next room over. His hand had moved up to his neck, fingers traced the twenty year old scar. The wolf’s teeth would be sharper, ruthless. Lupin’s would be kinder.

***

Potter was in his mind for a week. That endless image of him on the brink of death. His blood pooled on the ground, seeped into the stone floor.

Even if he could use magic, there was no spell to erase that look in Harry’s eyes. It infected his every moment, was there in everything he did. Severus would have to spin every memory from his head to find respite. Even then, Potter would find his way back.

***

At night, Lupin lay on one side of the bed and Severus at the other. Lupin faced the window, his breath steady and even. Heat pulsed from his body, crept through the sheets. Severus didn’t sleep. He only blinked at the ceiling, counted the hours down until morning, until he could remove himself from Lupin’s side.

***

Their second moon together, Severus lay in the middle of the bed. Lupin’s screams were a sick, twisting feeling in the pit of his stomach. The air was thick with August heat, windows flung open to no avail. He wished he could sleep, wished he could dream of the wolf at his throat. He didn’t deserve to be here, didn’t deserve to live while others had suffered. But this was suffering, in a way. This life trapped with Lupin but unable to act. An eternal summer, sun hotter than it had ever been before, with no means of begging relent.

In the morning, just after sunrise, he deemed it safe enough to leave his bed. He went to the kitchen, boiled water on a gas stove that had no reason to still be working (but the rush of gas was there, the sick smell of it in the back of his nose, and matches struck out a ring of flame). He made a cup of tea from old tea bags and bottle water. Cooled it with UHT milk which by now must be nothing more than a slow acting poison. He picked the mug up and pushed the door open to Lupin’s room.

Lupin was naked on the floor of his cage, skin tender, ribs moving up and down as he half-slept. His right arm was resting below his heart, the other flung out beside him. His body was riddled with pale scars and interspersed with fresh blood. Severus set the tea down on the outside of Lupin’s cage, and bent down to unchain the door.

“Severus,” Lupin said in barely more than a breath. He was looking straight at him through his lashes, uncaring and unashamed at his nakedness. He sat up in his cage, winced as he rolled out a crick in his neck. He shuffled forward, opened the cage and took the mug into his hands. He stayed inside, the act of sitting up exhausting enough. Below his heart, uncovered now by his hand, was a string of blue-black numbers that Severus refused to believe. If he closed his eyes, backed out the room slowly and crawled into bed, those numbers would disappear. The truth would be unlearnt and Lupin would have spent the last twenty years wandering as he had. But the evidence was there, etched permanently onto skin.

Lupin’s free hand came up to rub the number as Severus wanted to. He glanced up and Lupin was looking at him.

“I survived, longer than most did.”

Severus looked away, out through the window at the red sky. Lupin had always been so unfailingly kind, had always fought on the side of good despite his place in the world, never once thought that the world deserved punishment for his mistreatment. At eleven, Lupin had been shy and unassuming, had passed him by in the corridors with no remark but a repenting smile. Had years later begged potions notes off him through the laughter of his friends. Lupin in the shrieking shack, Severus having been led to an almost death, the glimpse of the wolf staining dreams for a decade. But afterwards, Lupin had chased Severus down, had begged him, had cornered him in bathrooms, pleading for forgiveness.

He was no monster, but those numbers of his chest told a different story. Severus opened his mouth to speak but no sound came out.

“They took me from my home, some fifteen years ago,” Lupin said, sensing what Severus had wanted to ask. “I was imprisoned at one of the early internment camps, kept locked in a room no bigger than the bathroom here. During the month, they’d keep us all separate from one another. When we were made to work we were forced to do so in silence, not even allowed to look at the back of anyone’s head. On the moon, they’d lead us into cages of twenty, then ten. It was sport to them, starving us for days in advance and then watching us tear each other apart at the sight of the moon. It’s not a tattoo you saw. They pressed liquid silver into our skin. Not enough to kill but enough for me to always know it’s there. I had a reason to live on, a purpose driving me like no other. Dumbledore was right of course, love is a reason to fight, a reason to go on.”

“A reason to die if it suits him. You needn’t forget Lily, or the Potter boy—” his eyes still burnt into his mind, his chest ached at the thought of it.

“You remember Dora of course?”

Lupin was always one for stupid questions. How could Severus forget her, with her bright pink hair, how blood had poured from her mouth like Potter’s did, the mouth which she had used to kiss Lupin, to worship him —

“I remember,” he said curtly. His heart stopped, head whipped round to Lupin as he realised what he had forgotten about him.

“You never had the chance to meet our son Teddy, despite all those years we saw of each other. I thought of him every day I was in there. Every full moon when I was lead into that cage. I thought of him always.”

“Where is he?” Severus asked. He couldn’t tear himself away from Lupin who blew at the surface of his tea.

“He is somewhere. I am sure of it.”

Severus tried not to think of the night he had found Tonks, pushed her into the back of his mind, how she had begged him. Teddy had been nowhere to be seen. Her eyes wide and trusting. Her hands staining his robes red, drawing him into her.

“I’ll help you,” he said. “I’ll help you find your son.”

Lupin closed his eyes. Set the mug, half drunk, on the floor. Smiled in a way Severus had never seen before. It ripped him in two, pulled him back together. “Thank you,” Lupin said.

“Let’s get you to bed. You need the rest,” he said. He moved so he was kneeling, offered his arm out to Lupin who gladly took it. Lupin’s hand was hot, his fingers biting in their grip.

“I’ll won’t sleep tonight if I go to bed now. I’ll keep you up. I’ve spent so many nights on the floor, so many days exhausted and recovering, what’s one more sleepless day amongst friends?”

Friends. The word stung like an arrow.

“I don’t sleep. Not for years.”

Lupin stilled, looked at him.

“Not since Potter.”

***

“Don’t you find the silence unnerving?” Lupin asked. Severus had thought him sleeping. His head was resting on the back of an armchair, exposing his neck. His legs were stretched out in front of him, making obvious the ill fit of his trousers. If Severus wanted to, he could move from his place on the sofa to floor and fit his hand around Lupin’s ankle. He could fold up the cuffs of Lupin’s jeans until the scars on his calves were revealed, the places, he had by now learnt, where he had been chained. Dittany would heal the fresher cuts. An infusion of turmeric in anaesthetic balm would fade the older ones. He would not, did not, want to to touch Lupin’s skin. Did not want to know the pulse in Lupin’s calf. Did not want to rest his cheek against Lupin’s knee.

“I’ve grown accustomed to it,” he replied, tongue heavy in his mouth. “In London there is nothing. Half the city burnt to dust, no noise other than animals or building collapse.”

Lupin hummed, a smile cracking at the corner of his mouth (like the crack now obvious in the window sill, where it had not been before). His eyes opened to look at Severus. Severus couldn’t stand the heat of the gaze.

“A wasteland,” Lupin said.

“I think they call it peace.”

Lupin huffed, a singular sound that Severus wanted to hold to his chest. He gave no sign of response, so Severus went on.

“It’s absolution. Attempts to end the war unkept, the mass slaughter hardly going unnoticed. What better way is there to bring an end to fighting if not to venerate cities in excuse of a cull.”

“So instead of ending a war by winning it, they absolve themselves through fire and interment.”

“Abandon the city and leave it up to god.”

Lupin shifted forward in his seat. Hands clasped in his lap, hair falling forward onto his face. His eyes were dark, gone was the hint of gold.

“They were rounding up squibs in the end. Putting them in the cages with us. They made us monsters, to show themselves that they were right all along. That we really were.”

Severus had never brought himself to ask who it was who had imprisoned him. It remained unsaid, unclear. Perhaps now it was too late to ask. Wizards hated squibs for daring to be too muggle, muggles hated them for the small light of magic within.

“We were all so foolish,” Severus said, unsure of what else he could possibly say to make up for the past twenty years. “So foolish to think our troubles would end with the Dark Lord.”

“I never imagined myself to miss Voldemort. Never thought I’d miss the taboo of his name.”

“We had something to fight against. A cause worth dying for.”

Severus had never thought it possible that a war could be waged in which no-one was right. With both sides as evil and unforgiving as the other. War was never simple, there were always shades of grey and levels to the fight. With enemies misaligned, reason lost. Even in that second war, the side of good rested its victory on the death of a child.

Severus wanted to stand up, to walk out of that flat and into the street, to walk and walk until his legs gave out under him, so that he was crawling as he neared the sea. But Lupin was here. Lupin was alive when by all means he shouldn’t be. Magic was all but impossible, but the cupboards were full, the shops never out of water or canned goods. The shower still ran although it only did cold. The stove still lit.

He looked out the window, saw the sun hung high and golden light burning him, he looked back to Lupin, back to the sky and its wrong colour blue.

***

Lupin lay next to him, sleeping this time on his back. Severus was locked on the ceiling, mouth parted, eyes hot and stinging as he tried to push Potter away. But Potter was a force not to be reckoned with and those years spent defying the Dark Lord boiled down to nothing. Nothing had been the same since that day. Potter had fallen into blood and stone, boiled down to green eyes and bloody nose, white knuckles gripping at nothing. The world had broken in the after, fragmented by victory and vindication.

Had Potter clutched his hands so tight he held the strings of magic itself in his grasp? Had he taken with him to the afterlife what made it possible for wizards to be? Something had happened then, in that moment Potter’s eyes had locked with his. If it was that the strings of magic had been cut, then so be it. Severus was alive without meaning. He could breathe.

***

They were outside, laying on that stretch of grass across from their flat. The sun was high in the sky as it always was, and the grass which should have towered above them was only just needing cut.

“What are you thinking about?” Lupin asked. He was lying on his back, too close to Severus than was needed. He held a book in the air above his head, turning the page every so often. The rustle of paper was a comfort. The sound of Lupin breathing a curse.

He thought of Potter, how that stupid boy had hit the ground, his fame and compassion unable to support him. He thought of the sky, the sun, the ungrowing grass and endless food. The cracks in everything he saw. He pushed that last thought away, preferring Potter to his mind unravelling.

“Potter could have had a family. A wife, three children. If he hadn’t been foolish enough to die.”

“I didn’t think you so sentimental, Severus.”

Lupin had been the other side of the great hall, barely conscious enough to know what had happened. He didn’t know how Potter had looked at him, the slack of his jaw, his parted mouth. He didn’t know how blood dripped from his nose, covering his lips and skin and spilling onto the cold stone floor. Didn’t see the moment of death, the last horrible shuddering breath while eyes (not Lily’s, his) had locked to Severus’. But what had his death meant in the end? What had he held in his hands which caused the earth itself to break, caused magic to dissipate.

“Potter, the golden boy—” he couldn’t bring himself to go on. “He was young. A boy. Harry—” the name felt wrong, undeserving on his tongue. “He would be as old as we were then.”

Lupin sat up, book tossed aside. He twisted onto his knees, leaning until his face was inches from Severus’ own.

“You know,” Lupin whispered. “You feel it too.”

Lupin’s mouth was hard against his, lips dry and cracked. His teeth biting. Lips moved against jaw and cheek and eyebrow.

Severus tangled his fingers around Lupin’s wrist. Lupin’s heart beat in time with his own.

**Author's Note:**

> This stemmed from a picture of Alan Rickman behind the scenes of Prisoner of Azkaban. He was rehearsing the confrontation scene between Sirius and Snape in the shrieking shack, but Alan was also wearing a wonderful denim jacket.
> 
> “A wasteland,” Lupin said. / “I think they call it peace.” - a reference Tacitus' Agricola: "To ravage, to slaughter, to usurp under false titles, they call empire; and where they make a desert, they call it peace."
> 
> find me on tumblr @ https://halfbloodsev.tumblr.com


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